An employee of the Saratov State Archive stole unique books and sold them for 500 rubles

The Kirovsky District Court of Saratov will consider the case of the former head of technical and economic support of the regional State Archives, Alexei Polynin, who stole 46 unique books with a total value of 1 billion 234 million rubles and sold them on the Internet. This was reported by the publication “Public Opinion” with reference to the press secretary of the regional prosecutor’s office Tatyana Kazachenko.

According to the publication, we are talking about 46 copies of church registers of 1821-1825: the real value of each from collectors reaches 30 million rubles. The prosecutor's office said that during 2016, Polynin took books out of storage and threw them out of a window onto the territory of a neighboring construction site, where he later picked them up.

A State Archive employee sold all 46 books to two genealogists through the Avito classifieds website, and for each copy he asked for from 500 to a thousand rubles. Employees of the regional FSB department learned about the thefts after an appeal from a visitor to the archive, who was unable to receive the book he ordered, since it had already been sold by Polynin. During the investigation, all books were returned to the archive.